Submitted by “The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft’s recently-released Office 2007 product – and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users’ PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals.”
metalinks ( http://www.metalinker.org/ ) for higher availability and guaranteed integrity are at http://download.packages.ro/metalink/openoffice/
These are XML files, used by download programs, that list mirrors and checksums.
Until annotations are properly implemented (crucial in workflow environments), I don’t think OOo will gain widespread usage in business environments. I realize that the OOo devs can’t work on everything at once, but I think this one is a show-stopper for many organizations.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6193
I agree here. It’s very hard to insert a comment and expect others to read it, since they’re nearly invisible. As a developer says in the bug report:
Fortunately this issue seems to be something that a clever C++ developer should
be able to implement even without a deep knowledge of the Writer internals, so
we ask all interested people with development capabilities in C++ to help us
with this enhancement.
Of course some teaching will be necessary in the starting phase but support from
our side is guaranteed. Perhaps somebody would like to implement this in the
next Google Summer of Code?
Edited 2007-03-30 23:37
Wow so this shows how Open Office copies features.
Edited 2007-03-31 00:30
And you will of course claim Microsoft invented annotations (if you do that you don’t know the history of software development) – or what’s your point?
Personally I am looking forward to the release of KOffice 2.0 on the Windows, Linux, and MacOS platforms in 2008 so that OpenOffice will have additional competition. Does anyone know when OpenOffice 3.0 and KOffice 2.0 release schedules are I can’t find them? Also is it confirmed yet that KOffice 2.0 will be supported on Windows and Mac? I would really like to see some more cross platform competition.
Congratulations to OpenOffice team on another excellent release.
Does anyone know when OpenOffice 3.0 and KOffice 2.0 release schedules are I can’t find them?
I do not know about KOffice, but in an interview with one of the lead OpenOffice developers/arch’s when asked about OpenOffice 3.0, he explained that the flexability that the 2.0 arch provides them, allows them to fit considerably more improvements within the current infrastrucutre with out having to break backwards compatability.
So, I guess, they are in a very similar position to say GNOME, who currently have no need to migrate to a next majour revision, to be able to continue inovating and improving.
… and it STILL kerns text like a sweetly retarded epileptic crack addict in withdrawl.
Are they ever going to actually fix that, o r ar e the y ok wi th the ir te xt ke rni ng l ike thi s?
I’d love to use OoO instead of Office – and I would if it was actually USEFUL for editing this thing called TEXT.
Edited 2007-03-31 05:23
How about the joy of working? I really can’t say that OOo can compare itself with MSO2k3 at all. It just “looks” and “feels” bad. FOr instance. When writing “misspelled text in MSO you get a nice red underlining which looks soft for the eye. In OOo it more looks like the text blopper out with some red mess.
Can all usability engineers please stand up
I couldn’t care less for MSO. I haven’t used it for 4 years and I really don’t miss it. There are NO features that I use that I can’t find in OO. Compatibility with MSO formats is ok for me, and I can export directly to PDF without Acrobat Distiller or PDF Creator.
Also it costs nothing … while MSO is ridiculously overpriced.
The only complaint I have is that it starts in almost the same time as the OS
Edited 2007-03-31 07:25
The only complaint I have is that it starts in almost the same time as the OS
Yeah. There’s lots of work being done on this at the moment.
On Windows, OO Writer kerns text acceptably (acceptably–it’s not pretty by any means). But, for some reason, its text kerning is twelve times worse on Linux for me, so I seek shelter in TextMaker and Word 2000 on CrossOver.
You have to give OpenOffice some credit, though–their kerning is no where near as bad as AbiWord’s.
WordPerfect has the best text kerning I’ve seen by far. It’s a shame WP doesn’t run acceptably in CrossOver and there’s not an up-to-date Linux port of it. Otherwise, it would be my word processor of choice.
>> its text kerning is twelve times worse on Linux for me
That’s because freetype cannot kern text worth a damn either – you run a word processor with kerning issues atop a font rendering engine that’s also got kerning issues, it is going to be a factor worse.
Freetype handles text kerning a lot better than Windows. You might want to use a version of FreeType2 _with_ the patented BCI enabled. And use some good fonts (and no, not MS Corefonts, but real fonts like Humnst777 BT from Bitstream or fonts from Heidelberg – professional fonts).
OpenOffice has bad kerning on all platforms. It’s bad on Windows and bad on Linux. However FreeType beats standard kerning in Windows anyday and is – with the patented BCI enabled – at Mac level.
>> Freetype handles text kerning a lot better than Windows.
You and I must have different definintions of ‘better’. I’ll stack Windows 3.1 and old school MacOS kerning of truetype against the latest freetype ANY DAY.
This statement really confuses me, you do realize that kerning is just the space between characters, right? The ‘dancing i’ syndrome being the most obvious problem in cleartype (and OoO), but other chara cter s al so en d up lo oki ng l ike th i s.
>> (and no, not MS Corefonts, but real fonts like
>> Humnst777 BT from Bitstream or fonts from
>> Heidelberg – professional fonts).
Frankly, if you have to use a special font meant JUST because of a specific font rendering engine, it’s not a very good engine… Especially when BOTH Windows and MacOS work JUST FINE with MS Core fonts, translated postscript fonts, and most anything else you throw at them.
Edited 2007-04-01 00:55
I know what kerning is. Trust me, you cannot attempt to design a top class Bauhaus font without having been dragged through the history of fonts since Gutenbergs printing press.
Kerning works really fine with FreeType2. You just have to configure it correctly. The problem is that most distributions ships with a version without the patented BCI enabled. And yes, FreeType2 without the patented BCI looks really crappy. Really really crappy. Fedora is prove of that.
I agree ClearType doesn’t do a good job. FreeType2 without patented BCI does an equally bad job. But FreeType2 with patented BCI and Windows Standard Rendering (antialiazing without ClearType) has much better kerning.
I am NOT talking about using a special font. I’m talking about using professional fonts. Freeware and shareware fonts like those from Ray Larabie and others are good for what they are. But they are lightyears away from the professional fonts (used in the printing industry).
A bad font will always look bad no matter the engine. This is particularly true for TrueType with depends on intelligent fonts and a stupid renderer. Type 1 fonts (and OpenType CFF fonts) rely on a stupid font and an intelligent renderer. If a Type 1 font looks bad it’s either a really bad font or a really bad engine. If a Truetype font looks bad it’s almost always because of a bad font, since the font has the responsibility of rendering. The exception is if you are using a really weird engine like ClearType. The Vera fonts don’t render well with ClearType but renders well with Windows Standard Rendering and FreeType2 – as well as Mac OS X.
FreeType2 works well with MS Core fonts but these fonts are not professional. They are more like welldone shareware-fonts. Especially Arial – the slutty sister of Helvetica.
Windows does an extremely poor job of handling PostScript fonts and pretty much anything you throw at it. Mac OS X is state of the art in this area, and I expect no less.
You have no obviously never used PostScript-fonts or anything else on Linux with Freetype2 (with patented BCI).
If you had you’d know that support for PostScript fonts is every bit as good as Mac OS X – and perhaps even better (though that would be considered heresy in the graphical industry).
>> Kerning works really fine with FreeType2. You
>> just have to configure it correctly. The problem is
>> that most distributions ships with a version
>> without the patented BCI enabled.
Which Ubuntu does ship with it enabled (I know, I checked – even compiled it without to see the difference – UHG) and I’m STILL UNIMPRESSED on the kerning front compared to even Windows 3.1.
>> Windows does an extremely poor job of handling
>> PostScript fonts and pretty much anything you throw
>> at it. Mac OS X is state of the art in this area,
>> and I expect no less.
Again I think you are talking about character rendering, Not Kerning – in fact I’m CERTAIN of it because Windows Truetype engine and Apple’s Truetype engine share a common ancestry – which is why they both kern almost identical.
Freetype, EVEN WITH BCI looks like crap on the lions share of fonts out there – You ADMIT THAT yourself, then blame the Type1 standard. You accuse the engines that render them well of being sub-standard or ‘stupid’ – when they do a BETTER JOB on said font types by your own admission. If the fault lies in the font and not the engine – why the hell does a ‘stupid’ engine do a better job than Freetype?
Your arguement contradicts itself so many times it’s like an amusement park funhouse maze of mirrors.
If the same file works in one place, but not the other, you don’t blame the file… You even say that the rendering of the font in type one relies more on the font than the engine – then why the hell isn’t freetype letting the font do it’s job?
As to windows rendering of fonts, I’ve NEVER heard a complaint about that until your post – while my own eyes say what total crap freetype (even with BCI) is…
Well, unless you bump the resolution to 2048×1536 on a 17″ CRT and double the size of everything. They are using a kerning and character generation method meant for print on a screen media – that’s a /FAIL/ right there.
Edited 2007-04-01 21:12
Dooh.. somehow I managed to post my reply to my own post rather than to your post.
Sorry ’bout that.
Anyway, just want to fix something you misunderstood.
You even say that the rendering of the font in type one relies more on the font than the engine
No, that’s the opposite of what I said. I specifically wrote that Type 1 fonts (and all other fonts with PostScript outlines) primarily depends on the renderer, while TrueType fonts (including OpenType TT) relies on the font.
A stupid renderer has nothing to do with being sub-standard. A “stupid” renderer is a renderer where the font handles most of the rendering, while an “intelligent” renderer (e.g. a PostScript font-renderer) takes care of the actually rendering leaving the font to only contain the most basic hinting information. It has nothing to do with being sub-standard.
I have several times written that Windows Standard Rendering has great kerning. ClearType has bad kerning, just like you wrote in your original post. We agree on that point. The problem is you don’t know what FreeType2 looks like when using BCI. With or without hinting, kerning is looking really good with BCI enabled.
And in regard to OpenOffice and its particularly bad kerning. This is fixed in OpenOffice 2.1 (at least for Linux). Kerning is now correct and there is n omored anc ingl etter s.
Freetype, EVEN WITH BCI looks like crap on the lions share of fonts out there – You ADMIT THAT yourself,
I don’t admit that. That’s not what I wrote, you liar.
I wrote it looks really good – especially with type 1 fonts. If it looks bad with Type 1 fonts the problem is most likely the renderer, since Type 1 (and OpenType CFF) fonts contain very little hinting information, while TrueType (and OpenType TT) fonts include a lot of hinting information (actually it is “instructions”).
A bad looking Type 1 (read: font with PostScript outlines) font is most likely the fault of the renderer, while a bad looking TrueType font is a failure of the TrueType font.
I call crap on your statements. You have never used FreeType2 with BCI. Windows Standard Rendering is reasonable though with quite inferior antialiazing. ClearType has much better antialiazing but has extremely poor kerning. Even with the fonts from Microsoft. You admitted that yourself in your original post.
Windows Standard Rendering has great kerning for good Truetype fonts, but bad TrueType fonts look like crap and OpenType CFF fonts are useless on Windows. And Windows cannot handle Type 1 and Type 3 fonts _without_ 3rd party software.
Mac OS X and FreeType2 has virtually identical kerning while Windows is nowhere identical with Mac OS X or FreeType2. This is because TrueType in Windows is nowhere identical to TrueType in OS X, while FreeType2 uses an Apple patent in the BCI (which is why it is often compiled without the said BCI).
Windows 3.1 has much better kerning than Windows with ClearType. Windows without ClearType has much better kerning. But the shapes don’t look to well, and the quality of the fonts are extremely important for the look, due to the dumb renderer. That’s the way it is with TrueType fonts.
I don’t know what’s wrong with your setups, but I don’t have any problems with kerning either with OO Writer, or with Freetype in general (in applications and so on).
Aren’t you making a mountain out of a molehill here?
I use both MS Office (at work) and OpenOffice (for my book) everyday. The only thing really missing from OOo is the Outline mode, which is being actually being worked on right now by the OOo developers. Honestly, they’re both very good Office suites. For the money, OOo is the clear winner, but some people may absolutely need MSO.
A lot of the negative postings about OOo here seem a bit disingenuous.
I always am using fixed width fonts because I really hate the sight of proportional fonts so I had to loopup kerning.
at least, the kerning is on by default.
This is no longer true for OpenOffice
OpenOffice 2.1.0 just went “stable” (you might run into issues with STLport) in gentoo and I dare say it is much better now. Non eo fth eo ldk ern i ng pr oblem san ymore. The main menu now renders completely identical to rest of my Linux desktop and kerning issues are gone. Completely. No matter how much I zoom in or out there is no kerning issues.
It is much better integrated now. Using Tango icons by default, FreeType2 rendering by default and so on. It looks really smooth by now. And it loads almost as fast as Scribus
Abiword and Gnumeric fill my needs quite well and run much much faster.
To be honest, I hope you’re not the kind of type then who says “linux ready for the desktop”. As long as devs and users with SMALL Office app needs start making generalisations about their needs and try to reapply it for others needs, not anything is gonna be ready at any time soon.
Sorry dude, OOo is not enough for daily Office work for any office poweruser. Powerusers are the ones defining what use in the business landscape, not those with the least needs.
It’s a shame and I’m sorry to say, that OOo has a LONG way to go to reach adoption. Sure, it may be fine for some small business only using desktop for sending quotations for plumbery, but any real business will simply laugh outright at it’s performance, looks and features.
I’ve used OOo on the side of MSO for 3 years now, and I’m not trying to be a bastard, I’m just hoping someone picks up the usability issues and iron ’em out. unfortunately, people keep putting their heads in the sand.
Ok I’ll be quick.
Linux is ready for the desktop; Openoffice is ready for the office users. That it.
The reality is this post lacks *any* content. I hate the term poweruser(sic), becuase such things do not exist. I have spent *more* time showing people even basic features of *word* than I have real computer work, and I suspect an awful lot of people here have.
There is only one trouble with OpenOffice and the other office packages that can be had for less than the extraordinary high price of Microsoft Office, and that is Microsoft is *the* standard. All of them are *good enough*. The trouble is they are not Microsoft Office.
Please include some content in your posts. Rather than sweeping statements without reference.
Edited 2007-03-31 15:37
I have to disagree with you. I’ve used both MS Word and OOo daily for years for work and personal. I work on Linux (by choice, in a company that uses Windows almost exclusively) and I preach Open Source. But OOo does not achieve feature parity with MS Word. For standard use of just typing and formatting a document, yes, maybe. But there are some key features lacking in OOo in a work environment that makes heavy use of document creation and editing:
1. Annotations, as I covered above.
2. Merging tracked changes from multiple documents.
3. Bullets and numbering (implemented, but doesn’t work as well as MS Word)
4. No equivalent of “normal view” in Word (“web view” doesn’t cut it)
5. No support for VBA (not that VBA is better than OO Basic, plus OO has support for Python scripts, plus Java, which is very cool, but organizations have VBA scripts and they need to be able to easy port them to OOo)
6. Tracked changes (navigation, accepting/rejecting), not as easy to use as MS Word.
7. In MS Word you can assign a number of users to the document, email it to them, and it keeps track of who has edited it and who still needs to edit it. Nothing equivalent exists in OOo.
I’m not bashing OOo. I’m just saying that it’s just not ready for document editing in a collaborative work environment. It’s fine for home users or work that just depends on basic document creation.
4) The “normal view” in Word? You really miss that crappy thing? A leftover from the buggy textwriter part of MS Works?
That’s a first… *sigh*
The “normal view” in MS Word is a bug. Not a feature. It’s a bug.
Are you serious? Normal View is an essential thing when I want to concentrate on content while having arbitrary text zoom so as not to damage my eyes (without using horizontal scrolling), BUT also have just enough oversight over the most important presentation aspects like page and section breaks.
It just proves that some people have gotten used to Microsofts bugs being state of the art-behaviour
Firstly, why exactly is it a bug, can you elaborate? Secondly, this is not Microsoft’s invention – the same feature, albeit named differently (“Draft Mode” or smth. like that), exists in Word Perfect and AFAIK was introduced independently.
That said, there ARE bugs that prove to be a feature. It’s just that Normal View doesn’t look like a bug to begin with.
An excellent overview! I miss exactly the same things, being a professional translator.
I’ll list some additional deficiencies here:
8. Inability to search and replace styles based on content – for example, apply a bullet list style to a paragraph starting with a bullet inserted as char, which I often have to do with converted PDF documents.
9. Limited hotkey assignment: can’t assign an arbitrary key combination, can’t assign a hotkey to a special character.
10. Limited keyboard control:
* Can’t select a paragraph with one keystroke
* Can’t move one paragraph up or down with one keystroke
* Can’t move a table row up or down with one keystroke
11. The visual model of a paragraph is broken. To select one paragraph (with associated para formatting) in a bullet list, you have to actually include a part of the next paragraph (namely, its bullet) in the selection. This is weird. In Word, to select a paragraph along with its formatting, you just include the paragraph break symbol in the selection, which is sensible.
12. No Redo as in “perform the same action on another object without creating a macro”.
13. To whoever designed OOo Writer: bullets and numbering ARE a part of paragraph formatting!!! When I say “Clear formatting”, it means that I want them to go, too.
As for 3: the most important problems for me are imprecise export (preventing para level changing in Word from functioning correctly) and inability to graphically set bullet<->text positioning. (Even Abiword has that right!)
As for 5: VBA is actually better than OOo Basic. It’s more comprehensible and much better documented.
On the other hand, the best features in OOo for me are PDF export and regexp search – the latter is mighty quick! Also, OOo tends to be more stable on .odt documents than Word is on .doc files – at least, I’ve never seen OOo mangle numbered lists in the whole document because of restarting numbering in one place, which is common for Word.
Edited 2007-04-01 10:30
Oh, and one more:
14. Inability to copy styles between templates and documents one-by-one.
(Even Abiword has that right!)
No it doesn’t, I stand corrected…
Alright Mr “Mod down because you don’t agree with opinion” zealot.
Them features you claim to be worthless… from the top of my head, how about some easy examples.
1. Kerning has been mentioned.
2. I also mentioned the Look n Feel. Have you actually used both? OOo looks bad, it doesn’t look appealing to work in. Especially the writer app. Misspell a sentence, do the same in MSO and see which looks clogged up.
3. Have a look at Impress. NOw open Powerpoint. Now make a Chart of any kind and try to enhance it’s look. Simply compare the sorts of charts available. Let me guess, charts not used? Good day mr non business user. Charts are normally used all over the place, and people expect them to look good.
4. Open Writer again. Let’s say you wanna make a document template in there. Say for instance your company profile always have a border on any side of that document in a colour extending from where the paper start to let’s say 1 or 2 or 3 cm in from the side of the page. How does that look? Oh, no problem in MSOffice?
Just gave some examples of the top of my head. So OOo can’t handle quite a few corporate profiles? It can’t customize or for that sake draw a bunch of charts commonly used? How is that “Good enough”?
Don’t give me any jibberish, and STOP modding people down because they criticize a product. I DO hope OOo get’s somewhere, but with the Zealotry attitude enjoyed from you and many others, that just ain’t gonna happen. I wonder who’s sabotaging what here? DO you dislike OOo as you obviously wanna quiet critics down instead of emphasizing what they’re saying and how to build a better product.
What’s done here today proves to me that OOo won’t be the thing “happening” the next 2-3 years. Attitude changes take far more time, so maybe in 4-5 years assuming attitude actually change.
The real problem is that the OpenOffice code is absolute trash, and it takes forever to implement changes in it. It’s a shame, really. From what I’ve heard (and skimming some files myself) it’s in worst shape than the Netscape scrapyard was back in 1998 or whenever.
KOffice is a good alternative: it has a great code-base but is far behind in features and doesn’t receive nearly the corporate backing it deserves (which is kind of necessary since the office suite isn’t exactly a hobbyist programmer’s dream project).
The real hope is ODF — the more organizations that demand it, the more money will be thrown at OpenOffice — which is about the only thing that motivates this project, the code being as ugly as it is.
If Microsoft has ever been good at anything, it’s in making Office and .NET. (They can have Windows, though, ugh).
Edited 2007-03-31 18:06
Linux IS ready for the desktop. Haiku isn’t yet, though we all hope it’ll happen soon.
If Linux (KDE/Gnome) isn’t ready for the desktop neither is Windows or Mac OS X.
A newbie has fewer problems with using Linux than GUI power users from Windows. And that’s because the latter group is unwilling to learn a different approach. Try plugging in a USB key in Linux. Works like a charm and way ahead of WinXP/2K3.
Package management is years ahead of Windows as well, since Windows has no management apart from a primitive installer framework which does next to nothing.
OO.o is a good office application and no worse than MS Office. Apart from the kerning (which only is a problem in certain resolutions – on all platforms btw.) OO.o is pretty much on par. For anything but simpler documents MS Word is useless. The same is true for all other office applications from MS. An Office power user DO NOT use MS Office.
I don’t know what kind of work you do with Office applications, but in my experience, MS Office is quite a bit more advanced than OOo. OOo is not nearly on par. The only part of OOo that is almost on par is Calc. Writer and Impress are behind. Believe me, I want OOo to be on par and I use it daily for most things, but I regularly have to switch to MS Office (in a VM) for things that I can’t do, or can’t do easily, in OOo.
My opinion is, until OOo gets better: Casual user: OOo is fine. Power user: Use MS Office.
I don’t like Windows and I dislike most Microsoft products, and their policies of course. But Office is one thing that Microsoft has done right.
Oh Christ, not *another* person who thinks because he knows 100 keyboard short cuts off the top of his head, and moves his mouse around at 2,000 metres per second, whilst having all 9000 buttons on his mouse programmed to do everything from close a window to scratch ones balls.
If there was *ever* something I would *love* to be stamped out, its employee’s who think that *everything* in their office suite they need to get their work done – clue to the employee, you’re here to work, not create an art assignment for your school newspaper, and there are no brownie points given to those who can make the coolest border and font type for the title.
Edited 2007-04-01 14:05
Does it start any quicker??
the startup speed is really an issue for me, as I do have some slightly older hardware…
I wonder how much of it is due to the craptacular code generation of g++, beacuse when I run it on Solaris x86, I don’t see the speed issues I saw on Ubuntu Linux and Fedora 6.
The Novell team working on OOo speed have submitted a few patches to GCC to improve startup performance.
Even so, maybe OpenOffice.org/Sun should start using the Sun Studio compilers for Linux rather than relying on GCC/G++, which might yield an improvement.
I can see how switching compilers would benefit OOo in the short term. But that is really down to the distros. You can’t force (for example) Debian to compile it’s ooo binaries using some non-standard(for Debian) compiler.
Also, by sticking with GCC, there is a big incentive to improve the optimization features. People are working on GCC optimization as a direct result of OO.o’s sluggish startup. This is a good thing for the Whole linux community, and in the long run may also be a benefit to Ooo directly.
If you have Java enabled in OOo, disabling it will increase startup speed considerably. Also, on Linux you can add ooffice -quickstart -nologo -nodefault to your startup session for faster loading/creating of OOo documents.
what happen with the analyis a guy made to improve OO?
not able to find the article but the guy explained all the problem and some fix …
Hmm, I know they’re adding dtrace probes to Mozilla, hopefully they’ll plow OpenOffice.org full of them to track down where the bottlenecks are.
Yeah, I live with it but it’s a painful life.
When a docked toolbar (like the table toolbar in Writer) gets hidden after switching from table to a regular paragraph text, the whole page jumps up.
It’s driving me insane.
Honestly, if someone is switching to and from a table frequently, and the whole page keeps jumping like a jojo, it’s really crazy.
I hope they’ll fix it someday.
Other than that, it’s a good value for the price of zero dollars.
And hey, they now included Slackware desktop integration!
After version 2.04 OOo changed the numbering scheme to 2.1 and now 2.2. in all honesty the last two releases do not deserve such big jumps in .x, they are more like 2.05 and 2.06. The differences are imperceptible. And almost nothing new in terms of functionality, except for mostly bug fixes. It is a shame that page numbering has not received the attention that it needs. To say that it really sucks is an understatement. Over 4 years ago I was the original submitter for MailMerge and Page Numbering bugs (issue) (bugs 7065 and 7066)
All of you complaining about this or that usability of OpenOffice should provide clear and concise feedback and/or appropriate bug reports to the developers. OpenOffice is pretty damn good for being a FREE office suite. Yeah, Microsoft Office does a lot of things better, faster, and more cleanly; however, you pay for that. You pay dearly.
Well for some of us money aint the problem…its the product. If something is good I will gladly pay for it no matter what the price cause you can always make more money. MSO is still miles better than OOO and I am talking about the 2k3 office suite. Not the latest one.
In my opinion, OOo sucks. It’s improving steadily, but it still sucks. What people seem to do though, is seem to think that OOo sucking somehow shows that Linux and Open Source in general sucks.
OpenOffice.org came from proprietary StarOffice, and the build system still seems to be absolutely horrid, the code is messy and the performance is bad. This has been the same since it was released as opensource. This isn’t completely beyond repair, and it is improving, but the complexity of making changes in this environment is really slowing things down.
For example, I submitted a patch for Gnumeric for a small problem that took me about 20 minutes to track down and fix. On OpenOffice, I’d have absolutely no idea where to start and the build itself would have taken a good few hours anyway. OOo’s build requires an unbelievable 3.5GB disk space.
I use OpenOffice, and according to Wikipedia, so do 14% of the large business market and 19% of the small-medium business market (there are citations for this on Wikipedia). It’s not horrific; it’s clearly usable since people do use it. Not just cheap bearded hippies either, but large companies. It could just be far, far better, and I think that the developers should just take these criticisms on the chin and keep working hard to compete with MSO.
It’s Python scripting is exceptionally useful in a corporate environment, (ever seen the horrific hacks they have to do on VBA in companies?) and many people still like the old Office 2k3 look over the 2k7 look.
I’m happy to see OOo still going strong and gaining support. If for nothing else the simple fact that it’s adds choice and competition into the office market place.
However, coming from a WordPerfect background, OOo is just unusable to me. The layout is bad and the features I like are just lacking. However, I keep an eye on it and I keep waiting for the day when I can move on over to OOo.
It seems that this
http://gawrysiak.org/corvus/?p=6
is still valid… Quite sad – it seems to me sometimes that OO development slows down – while MS is accelerating (on Office front at least…).
Anyone know if batch printing on OO 2.2 works in Windows? They broke it back in 2.04, and I depend on this feature. (I did submit a bug report.)
I really would have liked having something like OOo available when I was going to college. Back then, our choices where basically AmiPro, Word, or Word Perfect. All of them were overkill for writing high school and college papers. That said, now that I am in the work place, I have to say that OO does not belong anywhere near there. It is far too slow, bloated, buggy, and lacks too many features. One thing I find myself doing a lot is taking advantage of the integration Microsoft has with Outlook, Visio, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Project. I simply could not use OO to accomplish the same tasks.
“I really would have liked having something like OOo available when I was going to college. Back then, our choices where basically AmiPro, Word, or Word Perfect. All of them were overkill for writing high school and college papers. “
LOL
I’m older than most here. When I was in high school and college, I made do with MacWrite, and so would’ve been content with today’s WordPad (bundled with Windows) and TextEdit (bundled with OSX). Had to do footnotes/endnotes/bibliography by hand, but so what; I knew others that used good old-fashioned typewriters. LOL
Edited 2007-04-01 09:01
I remember the typewriter on which I did my first college essays…it could memorize a single line of text, which it displayed on a one-line LCD display, and only printed it when you pressed the carriage return (what kids today would call the “enter” key…)
The company that I work for uses openoffice at 309 branches so far. Only head office use ms office for access and excel.
Calc is getting better, but it needs a text to columns feature . (If I have missed it please show me where it is <-;)
Base needs a tool where it converts access DB to Base DB.
With above sorted I think the Head offices could also scrap MS office for good as well.
but for the basic not-so-professional-typing, OOo does what it needs to do and free. For most of the business use and not the “power user” (whatever that may be), it’s a good product.
People can whine all day about bad or excellent font rendering on Linux but the latest cvs source has some nice stuff for testing fonts:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2007-03/msg00062.h…